Let’s get something straight from the beginning. The NFL is a very successful business and entertainment entity. It enjoys immense popularity among loyal and passionate fans. It is “the alpha male” of all sporting endeavors in the US. The owners and the players union have come to a sufficiently harmonious modus operandi/modus vivendi to find a way to share about $8B a year. I’m not trying to say here that the NFL is in trouble and needs to make changes to put itself into a healthy situation; the NFL is not the WNBA.
What I plan to outline in this rant and a follow-on rant soon are some things that will make a very good product a bit better. Just as I am willing to stipulate that the NFL is very good at what it does, I would hope that the folks running the NFL would stipulate that it isn’t perfect and might find ways to improve.
The first thing the NFL needs to look at very closely is the administration of the replay challenges. I am in favor of instant replay; I think that getting the call right is extremely important to augment the integrity of the games. I do not believe that the league should get rid of instant replay. At the same time, the league has made timing changes to the game in order to keep the majority of games inside a time frame that is compatible with TV schedules. And the way the instant replay is handled now, it consumes time. Some stat geek can go and look at all the game films and put a stopwatch on how much time is consumed by the pre-challenge confabs and the referee jogging off the field to get “under the hood” and all that stuff. My estimate would be 8-10 minutes per game on average. I think that someone “upstairs” can look at all the replay angles on a high def screen – assuming the game is televised in hi-def – and render a decision much more quickly. I’d leave the rules alone about what can be challenged and how many challenges a team gets per game, but I would suggest a change in the way that challenges are reviewed and administered.
The thing that the NFL needs to address in more ways than anything else is its scheduling. I think that the NFL needs to stop with the Thursday night games except for the opening game of the year and Thanksgiving Day. It should play all of its games on Sunday and/or Monday night until college football goes into its bowl season and then it can put on Saturday games too.
The in-season bye week needs to be reconsidered; it can provide an advantage for teams during the season and that doesn’t seem right. One solution might be to eliminate the bye week entirely and shorten the season by a week. You could concoct an argument for that by appealing to the toughness of the football players and pointing out that they don’t need no damned sabbatical in the middle of the season. However, that’s not going to get a lot of traction because that would reduce the number of time slots for networks to fill with NFL programming and NFL ad revenues by 1/17th. So, in lieu of eliminating the bye week for each team, why doesn’t the league assure that when a team comes off a bye it is playing an opponent who is also coming off a bye? In a 32-team league, there always has to be an even number of teams taking a bye week; so, schedule them to play each other in the game following the bye. How hard is that?
I would also suggest that the NFL review the schedule to assure that teams never have any 3-game road trips or home stands. In fact, I think the ideal would be for every team to play home and away games on alternating weeks throughout the season. Where that is impossible from some other scheduling constraint, the league should be sure that no team is home or away for more than two consecutive weekends. I got this idea from my friend “The Stat Monster” who pointed out to me that the Eagles had to play three divisional road games in a row in December of this year. After the Eagles won all three games, he sent me a note giving me this info, which I take to be correct because he is a “Stat Monster” and I’m not willing to do the work to verify it:
In the last 15 years, there have been 97 “3-game road trips” and the Eagles are only the seventh team to come off such a trip with a sweep. They are the only team to do so against three divisional opponents.
I’d suggest that the NFL make sure no future teams need to do this. Even more outrageous was the schedule quirk handed to the Houston Texans this season. From October 29 through December 3, the Texans played six games. Five of them were on the road. Why is that a good idea?
One other scheduling issue that the league needs to consider is flex scheduling. The idea is a good one on the surface; it gives the network involved (NBC) and the league the ability to put a meaningful game before a national audience late in the year. There’s nothing as boring in early December as having a Sunday night or Monday night game involving two teams with a combined record of 6-18. And flex scheduling pretty much prevents that from happening. However, flex scheduling comes at the expense of the fans in the stadium and the league ought to pay a bit more homage to those folks.
The game that made me sour on flex scheduling was the Seattle/Denver game. This game was supposed to start at 2:30 PM in Denver; it was cold in Denver that day but the sun was out. The game actually started at 6:30 PM; that night according to the broadcasters, the temperature was 16 degrees with a wind-chill down near zero. There was no sun to provide even a minor respite from the cold. Like all NFL games, this one took about 3 hours and the fans in the stands had to be uncomfortable – if not miserable – for at least half of that time. If the network execs who think this is a wonderful idea and a way for them to generate additional ad revenues to their coffers and the NFL owners/executives had to sit outside in the stands for the entirety of every flexed game, I suspect there’d be changes made in flex scheduling.
My last scheduling suggestion would be to eliminate the “dead weekend” between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl. I’m trying to think of any benefit that I receive as a fan for that “dead weekend”; I can’t come up with one. I can’t believe that the league and the networks need two weeks to set up the coverage for the game or that all the silly “feature stories” for the games can’t be done in time for the 4 hour pre-game extravaganza. So, cut out the “dead weekend” and play the game that fans want to see more than any other game of the season.
I’ll have more suggestions for the NFL in another rant in the near future.
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…